Hi,
I am tryijg to install Gentoo on a system with hardware for wifi but not for ethernet. The system has an existing WattOS install (WattOS r6, a derivative of Ubuntu tuned for older machines)

I have been following the install in the manual, as if working from the Gentoo minimal install disk, but skipping the parts about networking. The chroot environment works fine, and emerges the kernel sources using the host system's wifi. The new system boots OK, but obviously has no internet connection as it has no hardware for ethernet and no software for wifi.

So, back to the chroot environment with WattOS as the host.

I am hoping to use wicd: I like the ncurses interface and have used it on Gentoo before: it offers the convenience of a GUI based wifi management sytem with the low overhead of a command line system. Trouble is, I can't get it to install.

I keep getting circular dependencies involving the USE="pam" flag. These seem to arise whichever setting I choose, pam or -pam.

I tried using the generic desktop profile (ie not desktop/kde nor desktop/gnome) - is this right?

Questions:

Is my approach feasible, ie to do the emerge from within a chrooted environment running the gentoo software but on a non-gentoo kernel?

What USE flags do I need, if any, apart from ncurses, to get the wicd ebuild to install the wicd core and ncurses interface, but not any of the gui interfaces (as I do not really want to bring in all the qt / gtk / gnome / kde code)

Is desktop the appropriate profile, or should I be using server?

Can anyone explain why pam is an issue: I did not ask for it, it is not in my USE flags, nor apparently in the flags set by the profile

I was not sure if this belonged in this forum, or in networking queries. It feels like I have not installed Gentoo until the netwroking is resolved, and certainly do not yet have a GUI, which is why I eventually chose to post here.

But if I got that wrong, please accept my apologies, and either move my post or I can re-post it if you ask me to. R~~

And thanks for your very prompt response. I went away for the weekend after my previous post so have only just had a chance to follow your suggestion.

It looks like emerge wicd is now going to work - it wants to do a 270Mb d/l (a quarter of my mobile allowance) so have to wait till I'm on my unmetered connection to actually do that, but it is not complaining about circular dependencies any more which is a huge leap forward I also have a new version of portage and of gcc, so there have been two significant changes to @system since my last post.

In the meantime I do have another two questions which came up as a result of that change.

Quote:

Have you done an emerge --sync

yes, followed immediately by emerge portage because a message at the end of the sync told me to

Question: Should I have used any flags with the emerge portage command? It appeared to work happily without, but the side effect is that it added portage to my @world. Does this matter?

Quote:

emerge -uavDN @world

hmmm, my command had a mix of long and short flags ... looks at man emerge ... I think what I did was what you suggested plus the build-deps?

Code:

emerge -av --update --newuse --deep --with-build-deps @world

Anyway, ran my version of the command and it wanted to update six packages, and it failed on the second of six packages, I have the build log of the failed run if that would help. Interestingly the failed package was one of those in the dependency loop before, but it was not showing up any more as a circular dep.

I ran the same command again, and it selected the five packages (ie the same six minus the one that had worked) and ran ok.

I'm guessing I had picked up some kinda glitch in my previous sync and whatever was wrong has since been spotted and resolved by gentoo gurus,

At this point I tried emerge -av --depclean which the previous command had recommended. I cancelled that as the only package it thinks is superfluous is gcc and deleting that looked scary. Here is a snippet of the depclean ouput (I have it all if that would help)

Code:

sys-devel/gcc
selected: 4.5.4
protected: none
omitted: 4.6.3

and I think that is telling me it wants to delete 4.5.4 as it has been superseded by 4.6.3.

Question: Is that right? do I go ahead and allow the depclean?

I will post again when I have had a chance to emerge -v wicd but I am not now expecting problems with that

I have now got wicd to emerge. It runs, but does not work. In fairness to the forum guidleines, though, I think I need to move this query elsewhere as it no longer looks like specifically an install issue. But before I do that I am going to re-install from the stage3, as I did so many things trying to get it to work that I want to eliminate the possibility that I have inadvertently caused the problem